Academic literature on the topic 'Customs union of the European Union Doha development agenda'

Without doubt, the year 2001 will remain identified with the terrorist attacks of september 11. To some extent, this goes for the European Union as well. The events of september 11 left an important mark on the European integration process, of which the development of the European arrest warrant is an important illustration. Nevertheless, as for the European Union, the year 2001 was more than a year of anti-terrorism measures. In the second semester of2001, the Belgian government assumed the presidency ofthe European Union. 2001 was also the year in which, only weeks after street violence disruputed the European Council ofGöteborg, a protester was killed in the margin ofthe G7-G8 Summit in Genova. In 2001, the gap between the European Union and the United States got larger for a number of policy fields, including National Missile Defence and the Kyoto Protocol. Yet, in the autumn of2001, both power blocks reconciliated at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar. In Doha, a new global round of trade negotiations was launched. As in previous years, in 2001, the enlargement process was high on the European agenda. As for the latter, for the first time, ten candidate countries were mentioned by name, making their accession in 2004 a more realistic scenario. The eastern enlargement will radically change the face of the European Union. The Belgian presidency anticipated this impeding metamorphosis and stimulated the adoption of the Laeken Declaration in december 2001. The Declaration laid the foundation for the Convention on the Future of Europe which started on February 28, 2002. The Declaration of Laeken was one of the European highlights of 2001. The low point was the Irish referendum of June 7, 2001, in which a majority of the Irish population rejected the Treaty of Nice. Both events reflect the situation the European Union is faced with today, as they demonstrate the growing tension between the desires of «widening» and «deepening» the European construction. The future willreveal how the European Union went with this growing area of tension.

The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union with its overseas possessions returned to the political agenda the territorial dispute between Madrid and London over the Gibraltar semi-enclave. The opposite points of view have collided in the context of Brexit: the UK fundamentally defends its sovereignty over Gibraltar, Spain strives to regain the lost territory, the Gibraltarians want to maintain association with the Kingdom and not break with the European Union, the European Union is not eager to grant Gibraltar a special status, but at the same time is interested in maintaining a preferential financial zone in the South of the Iberian Peninsula. Separate issues of relations between the UK and Spain on the situation of Gibraltar for the transition period were agreed, they are set out in the “4 Memoranda”. The further fate of the territory depends on the UK's deal with the EU. The contracting parties guarantee that the interests of both Spain and Gibraltar are taken into account. Possible options: holding a referendum on the independence of Gibraltar; gaining control of Spain over the strategic objects of Gibraltar as a result of the deal; Gibraltar remains under the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and continues to cooperate with the EU; dual Spanish-British sovereignty will be established over Gibraltar; at the end of Brexit Gibraltar will not cooperate with the EU. But each of the proposed solutions requires certain concessions from the disputing parties. They are not ready to compromise yet. The authorities of Gibraltar, however, are aware that without cooperation with the UK, Spain and the European Union, their further successful state and development is impossible. More favorable conditions, in our opinion, for the Gibraltarians will arise with the accession to the Schengen area and the Customs Union.

The Doha Round differs from previous multilateral rounds since a number of participating countries are negotiating and implementing bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) at the same time as they are negotiating multilaterally. The standard arguments against FTAs involve that they create trade diversion, are difficult to administrate, involve complex rules of origin that impost added costs on firms, and attract the attention and political capital of policy makers away from the multilateral negotiation. This paper poses other arguments about FTAs being beneficial to the multilateral process. For instance, they have allowed some countries to achieve zero tariffs with all their main trading partners, and therefore a large majority of their trade, and often involve reforms in sensitive issues that, once undertaken, allow governments to assume a more offensive position at the WTO. Most importantly, by creating trade diversion away from countries that act as laggards in all negotiation fronts, they generate the competitive pressure that can move those nations to assume a more constructive position in the multilateral negotiations; also, it may be easier to harmonize existing FTAs than to seek comprehensive plurilateral and multilateral agreements from scratch. Beyond the discussion of whether FTAs help or hinder multilateral progress, the paper discusses changes in the multilateral rules, and best practices in bilateral negotiations, that can help make both fronts better complements. The issues mentioned include guidelines among rules of origin, origin accumulation, harmonization of standing agreements, bilateral trade facilitation and solutions to preference erosion. Alberto Trejos is a Professor at INCAE in Costa Rica. From 1994-1998, he was Dean of INCAE, and General Director of its Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development from 1999-2002. He was a professor in the Economics Department of Northwestern University from 1994-98. He has also been a visiting professor and researcher at the Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica de Barcelona, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Fundaçao Getulio Vargas of Rio de Janeiro, and the University of Texas. As Minister of Foreign Trade of Costa Rica in 2002-04, he was responsible for the negotiation of CAFTA and of the CARICOM-Costa Rica FTA. He was in charge of Costa Rica´s ratification of its FTA with Canada and its entry into the Central American Customs Union. Trejos is a consultant for several companies, governments, and international organizations, President of CINDE (Costa Rican Investment Board), and a board member of several corporations and organizations. He has published extensively in leading journals, and he has been a National Science Foundation grantee and a Fulbright scholar. He received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.

The role of regional economic communities in the development of trade in Africa is widely recognised. Currently, intra-African trade stands at 10 per cent. This is in sharp contrast to other developing regions of the world. In Asia and Latin America, the levels of intra-trade are 50 and 26 per cent, respectively. There are a number of reasons accounting for the low level of intra-African trade, including the weak mandate given to regional economic communities to monitor and enforce the commitments assumed by countries under regional trade agreements. The lack of integration has negatively impacted on African countries and affected their ability to attract foreign direct investment commensurate with their development needs. Had African countries been less exposed to external markets, they would have been minimally affected by the global financial crisis. The importance of boosting intra-African trade was highlighted by Africa’s Heads of State and Government when they devoted this year’s summit to this theme. In the run-up to the summit, the African Union Commission released a study that underscored the importance of regional economic communities in the process of economic integration in Africa. Currently, SADC member states are in the process of implementing the SADC Trade Protocol, which would create a fully-fledged free trade area and later a customs union, and at the same time engaged in tripartite negotiations aimed at merging the three (SADC, COMESA and the EAC) regional configurations. They are also engaged in the EPA negotiations with the European Union, which would create a free trade area and also the Doha negotiations under the auspices of the WTO. The main objective of this article is to estimate SADC countries’ bilateral trade potential, which may result in the improvements in trade facilitation.

AbstractThe proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) which share similar ideals with the World Trade Organization (WTO) has added to claims of disintegration within international trade law. Notwithstanding the ambiguity surrounding the reading of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XXIV on RTAs, WTO members are continuously negotiating RTAs with objectives which have so far not received universal acceptance under the WTO treaty system. In the context of European Union (EU)-Africa trade relations, the December 2007 EU-Africa summit was expected to be an appropriate venue for leaders from both sides to resolve the controversy surrounding the idea of development-friendly free trade agreements between the contracting parties. But, the summit was wrapped up without achieving any clear answer to this issue. Similarly, at the multilateral level, i.e. the WTO Doha Development Round negotiations, which the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States have sponsored, numerous development-friendly proposals on RTAs stalled since July 2006. Consequently, in view of this controversy, if development concerns can be factored into economic partnership agreements (EPAs), what would be an acceptable threshold for such RTAs to conform to GATT Article XXIV requirements of “substantially all trade” and “reasonable period of time”? This paper discusses the idea of development and WTO compatibility in the context of the EU-Africa Economic Partnership negotiations. In view of the flawed dispute settlement provisions under the Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA), the paper further tries to answer the question of whether the CPA contains rights and obligations that need protection by individual EU member courts and may necessarily be enforced before the European Court of Justice. The paper ends with some thoughts on the post-EPAs adjustment programme.

The article covers the issues of development of electronic (digital) commerce (EDC) as a key trend in transformation of the world economy. The emphasis is on multidimensional manifestations of the EDC and on a clear tendency towards further diversification of forms of this commerce under conditions of intensive technological transformations of modernity. Its spread is associated with the growing role of the EDC and it is proved that the pace and efficiency of its spread in the sphere of trade and economic operations is largely due to availability of information and communication infrastructure of adequate quality. It is shown that new prospects for the development of e-commerce are related to the key new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: analytics based on large databases, blockchain technologies, Internet of things and artificial intelligence. The author argues that the latest technologies create the foundation for a systemic change in the very nature of economic and non-economic relations. It is proved that the process of e-commerce spread is controversial and related to the possible presence of both positive results and negative consequences. Positive effects are primarily owing to a significant reduction in costs and expansion of the range of supply, increasing opportunities for promoting goods and services on the market (especially for small and medium-sized businesses) and a significant reduction of time of commercial operations. At the same time, the importance of security of economic development and protection of the rights of individual is emphasized, as in the context of the spread of e-commerce, the risks in these aspects are increasing. Particular attention is paid to the importance of coordinating the e-commerce policy development. The role of the leading international organizations – the UN (UNCTAD and UNCITRAL), the WTO, the OECD, the World Customs Organization, the Universal Postal Union – in the development and regulation of e-commerce is also described. Taking the European Union (the policy of forming a single digital market) and the Eurasian Economic Union (Digital Agenda of the EAEU until 2025) as an example, the growing importance of international regional policy in addressing this problem is shown.

The target of this diploma work is to provide the view of up to now development and present condition of economy relations between EU and Brasil (consequently between Czech Republic and Brasil), to describe and sum up the status of these relations and to point out the agents complicating the given cooperation. From the point of view of content the work is sectionalized into 5 chapters. The first one characterizes the economy of Brasil, the basic economy markers trends and the Brasil's fortes and weaknesses. The following 2 chapters tackle the juridical ambit of billateral EU and Brasil co-operation, agreements to govern their relationship, the analysis of the goods and services barter, direct foreign investments and protective restrains complicating the business. The content of the chapter No. 4 is the mutual EU - Brasil relations decsription in regard of their acting in wider aggregations, specifically in WTO and Mercosure. The last chapter is focused on the mutual czech and brasilian trade relations characteristic.